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As a journalist I have written about social issues and international affairs for the Guardian, the Independent, New Internationalist, Huffington Post, Equal Times and the Big Issue in the North, among other titles. I now work at the University of Leeds as a qualified careers professional, helping international students fulfill their career ambitions

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Susan May: Innocent as charged?

Susan May vividly recalls the spring morning she went to
check on her elderly aunt. “I went into the cake shop and bought auntie
something for her lunch. When I got to the house I went in through the back
door as normal and walked towards the door leading to her bedroom. The door was
slightly ajar so I pushed it open and…” She stops, her lips quivering and tears
fill her eyes, for the scene that met her upon entering the downstairs bedroom
nearly 20 years ago was so horrific, she can still find no adequate way to
describe its impact.

Her aunt, Hilda Marchbank, had been savagely murdered. The
bedroom, usually so pristine, was now a chaotic mess and the bloody body lay
sprawled on the bed, semi-naked and battered. May remembers little of the
immediate aftermath to the discovery. "I just remember looking down over
her body", she says, "to this day I don't remember how I exited that
house."

Weeks later May was charged and eventually convicted of her
aunt’s murder. She was released after serving 12 years despite consistently
protesting her innocence, and two decades on is in the process of applying for
a third appeal based on dramatic new forensic evidence and witness testimony.
Her supporters are confident she will be exonerated. May, now 67, is more
apprehensive.

There is little out of the ordinary about May’s upbringing.
Born in 1945 in Royton, her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a
house wife. The younger of two daughters, May attended Chadderton Grammar
school before leaving at 18 to work as a hairdresser. She married a lorry
driver at 23 and had three children; the eldest, Adam, in 1970, and soon after twins,
Katie and Toby. May established a hairdressing salon, and when her father died
of Leukaemia, moved with her family back into the house of her birth where she
remains today.

Marchbank, her mother’s elder sister whom May still refers
to as “auntie”, always played an important role in her life. So much so that
when May divorced her husband in 1985, she quit her job to care for her aunt,
visiting her frequently at her nearby semi-detached house in Royton. “I’ve
always been very close to auntie”, she says, as though referring to someone
still very much a part of her life, “I used to go up to see her at least three
times a day or she would come down to me for tea.” For a woman of 89 Marchbank
was relatively active and did not require round the clock care. But for a poor
short term memory her mind was sharp, and she would often spend long hours with
May’s mother reminiscing about their childhood.

May speaks with a palpable fondness of those days, a time
when her life was devoted almost exclusively to her family and nobody could
predict the traumatic events that would soon follow. That all changed on the
11th March 1992, a day which May does not recall being extraordinary. In the
afternoon Marchbank phoned twice asking May to remind her where she normally
left her keys. “It got me perturbed, knowing auntie as well as I did that she
wouldn’t want her keys unless someone was knocking on the door.” To put her
mind at rest, May paid her a visit later that evening. “She was in her nightie
sat on the bed. I asked her if somebody had been trying to knock on the door
and she said they might have been.” May reassured her that everything was
normal and as she left the house turned to see her on the porch waving goodbye.
This image sticks with her, because, she tells me, it was the last time she
ever saw her aunt alive.

That night Marchbank was beaten to death in a brutal attack
which appeared to be a botched burglary. May’s close friend Geoff passes me a
file containing police images of the crime scene. “That’s a bit horrific under
there,” he cautions, pointing to a paper flap with a warning message concealing
one of the more gruesome photographs. Having already glanced at several others
I decide against opening it.

May struggles to recount the days following the murder with
the same clarity and precision as those which preceded it, but remembers being
offered the services of a female ‘bereavement officer’ to help her, or so she
believed, cope with her ordeal. Then, two weeks later, the police suddenly
returned to her house in a more hostile fashion. “If I think back now there
weren’t just two or three of them, there were loads of police stood on my front
door, and a helicopter above”, she shakes her head indignantly. To her
disbelief, she was arrested on suspicion of murder. “All I remember is running
up the stairs for my son Toby, and the police woman running after me and
grabbing me.” May was charged two weeks later.

During her trial the prosecution argued that May’s
fingerprints, found in bloodstains on the wall of her aunt’s bedroom, proved
she had carried out the murder. They claimed her motive, later dismissed by the
judge in his summing up, was financial. Numerous expert witnesses were called
to testify against May, and the prosecution put forward what was on the surface
a compelling case. Conversely, May’s Barrister used only one witness, May’s
daughter Katie. This was despite dozens of May's friends and neighbours
offering to testify to her good character and love of her aunt. Nevertheless,
right up until the verdict was announced May remained convinced she would be
acquitted, and when the jury returned after just two hours deliberation her
lawyer assured her it must be a positive sign. In fact the opposite was true
and a unanimous guilty verdict was returned. “I remember banging on the bullet
proof glass and just shouting ‘you’re wrong! You’re wrong!’, and I turned to my
family and just said ‘help me!’”

The judge immediately imposed a mandatory life sentence
setting a minimum tariff of 12 years, and she was driven to HMP Risley for her
first experience of prison. Once incarcerated May soon discovered the nature of
the crime she was convicted of made her a target with other inmates. “I’d only
been there a couple of days when I got really badly attacked, twice in the
shower. Auntie was elderly and I didn’t realise that I was classed as a
‘nonce.’” After the attacks she describes “keeping myself to myself”, and
gradually began to earn the respect of other prisoners many of whom doubted
that such a seemingly gentle woman was capable of beating her aunt to death.
For over a decade May refused to take any prison rehabilitation courses and was
told that consequently she would never be freed. Yet astonishingly, in 2005 she
became the first lifer to be released after serving her minimum tariff without
ever admitting guilt.

Seven years later the fight to clear her name continues, but
recent developments suggest it may not be in vain after all. May hands me a
voluminous file containing the evidence which she has just been invited to
present to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Her manner quickly changes
from forlorn to animated as she enthusiastically points out the many flaws in
the prosecution’s case which were not raised at her original trial.

First there are the fingerprints. Of three blood marks
discovered on Marchbank’s bedroom wall one was found to contain May’s
fingerprint. However, initial tests concluded the stain could have been animal
blood, and given that May often prepared food for her aunt in the bedroom –
also a dining room - this seems at least a conceivable explanation. Subsequent
tests have indicated the stain may not be blood at all throwing the entire
forensic case against May into doubt.

Perhaps even more damning to the prosecution’s case however,
is the fresh testimony of a man questioned by police before May was arrested.
The police had received several tip offs from witnesses who described seeing a
red Ford Fiesta with its engine running outside Marchbank’s house at midnight
on the night of the murder. They tracked down and interviewed several people in
the area with access to red Fiestas including three friends - Craig Turner,
Robin Walker and George Cragg. Cragg now claims he was immediately told by
police he wasn't being treated as a suspect and that the sole purpose of the
interview was to eliminate the car from their enquiries. He alleges that when
he told Oldham police he had been travelling in a white car that night he was
asked whether he would be willing to lie and state he had been travelling in a
red Fiesta instead. According to Cragg when he asked the police why they would
want him to lie, they replied that they already knew who the perpetrator was
and had no intention of letting her get away.

Furthermore, it has been revealed that police received an
anonymous tip off two days after the murder implicating two men in Marchbank’s
killing. One of the men named was Michael Rawlinson, a man with convictions for
burgling elderly people’s homes, and who had access to a red Fiesta. Forensic
samples were taken from his sister’s car but were never sent for laboratory
testing. May’s lawyers were never told that the car had been traced and
consequently the jury never heard of Rawlinson’s existence. Rawlinson was
himself murdered six years later in a drug related dispute.

Des Thomas, former deputy head of Hampshire CID wrote a
report last year of the police investigation into Marchbank’s death. He said:

"The evidence may point to a pattern of behaviour which
raises a reasonable suspicion that the investigation was prejudicial, if not
overtly corrupt. My own review, based on disclosed documents, revealed
a number of apparent anomalies in the case...These anomalies may point to an
investigation, the principal purpose of which was to prove, by the selective
use and non-disclosure of evidence, the hypothesis that Susan May was guilty of
murdering her aunt."

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: "The criminal justice system has been
successively satisfied of her – May's – guilt and there is nothing further to
say on the matter."

And yet despite the mounting evidence in her favour May has
reason to be apprehensive. The CCRC have already referred her case to the court
of appeal once, in 2001, and at the time their report was widely considered one
of the strongest ever compiled. Nevertheless, a panel of three judges rejected
her appeal on the grounds that they saw no reason to doubt the forensic
evidence presented by a police officer and scientific expert at her original
trial.

Will this time be any different?

She pauses. It's the first time in the interview that May
appears slightly uncomfortable with my question. "I should believe I'll be exonerated", she finally
offers, "because I know I'm innocent and I know the evidence is there, but
after everything I've been through, sadly I'm not overly confident."

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